Happy Quirky Alone Day!

For most people, Feb. 14 means Valentine's Day. A day when you give/get chocolates and flowers to your significant other. But Feb. 14th is also Quirky Alone Day. A day to celebrate those who are just a little bit different from the average bear.

Do you want to find out if you belong to them? Take this quiz to see if you're quirky.

I took the quiz and guess what? I'm very quirky.

"How quirkyalone are you? Your score was 92. Very quirkyalone: Relatives may give you quizzical looks, and so may friends, but you know in your heart of hearts that you are following your inner voice. Though you may not be romancing a single person, you are romancing the world. Celebrate your freedom on National Quirkyalone Day, February 14th!"

Best Things About New Orleans

So this is the last part of the fabulous Great Cruise of 2008. After touring through several countries, we had to return to the US. But the fun was not over yet. Nope, we had 2 more days of fabulous-ness in New Orleans. The highlights of which are:

1) getting my first ever cup of gumbo and having a claw sticking out of it. I ordered the seafood gumbo, which came with crab. But, they don't take the crab apart before they put it the gumbo. Nope, you get the thing whole. 'Twas a little alarming to see, if you're not expecting it. Messy to eat, but still oh so good.

2) Staying in a haunted house. One of the first things we did was take a haunted history tour of New Orleans. You can't stay in the French Quarter without taking this tour. The best part is that its at night, and any local who sees you will make ghost noises as they walk by. The second best thing is that our hotel was the second stop on the tour. Alas, we did not see any ghosts.

3) St Joseph's Cathedral's Free Christmas Concerts. We were only a block away from St. Joseph's so we went to this every night. Guess who we saw? Ellis Marsalis. If you know anything about jazz, you know how cool this was.

4) Po'boy's as big as your head. Before we left for this trip, many people told us we had to eat at Mulate's. They have really good food and live Cajun Music. On the day we had planned to go, we had po'boys for lunch. By the time we got to Mulate's, which was probably around 8:00 pm, we were still full from the po'boys. We had to force ourselves to just eat dessert.

Great Cruise 2008 - Cozumel

Cozumel was our beach day. Instead of going on a tour or excursion, Mason and I decided we would do the beach. And we were rather certain we could find the beach ourselves, so we declined the Cruise Ship's offer of taking us there and back. We didn't want to be limited to their schedule. In hindsight, we probably would have been better off going with the ship.






How hard could it be to find a beach in Cozumel? They are known for snorkeling and beaches. And its not that big of an island, so we thought if we just picked a direction and started walking, we'd find one in no time. Not so. After half and hour the most we saw was rocks, some sea side diners, and another dock for more cruise ships. So we turned backed, thinking we could catch the ferry to Cancun and spend some beach time there. Turned out that the ferry schedule wasn't that great. We would only have 30 minutes or so before we'd have to turn around and come back or be left by our ship. Finally, we gave in to one of the many guys calling "Taxi!" and had him drive us to a beach.



Unfortunately this was the coldest day of our trip. The locals were all in coats in hats. Since Cozumel weather is not much different from Texas weather, I was cold. Getting in and out of the water was not a pleasant experience. You know how once you get a lake or a river or something and its cold at first, but then it warms up? The opposite was true for that part of the Caribbean. We did manage to stay floating in the water for about an hour. Then I gave up. After about 20 minutes of watching me shiver on the beach, Mason took pity on me and claimed she was cold too and we spent the rest of the day picking out souvenirs. The sun came out when it was time to leave though.

Just look at those clouds! If you were swimming under that, wouldn't you be cold too?


And just because I haven't shown you yet, here's a shot of our cruise ship, the Norwegian Spirit.

And then we came to the End

This is it. The last post for the 23 Things. Oh how I will miss those furry little numbered Things running around my computer; introducing me to Library 2.0 applications and tools. My favorite Things were Flickr and Downloadable Media. I even created my own Flickr account; and, now that I have a digital camera, I can actually upload images to it. I'm sure I'll continue to use Google Docs and, of course, Blogs.

Speaking of blogs, I just found out from the PLA blog that there's a way to search library catalogs from Facebook. Its some sort of plug in or application. The blogger was talking about how he (or she) was going to learn how to do it at the ALA conference in Denver. I think that would be so cool! Guess I've got some more learning to do.

Proof that I'm a Nerd

Today I was revisiting a series that I had started some time ago and hadn't finished. The book that I stopped at was Voyager. Guess what pops into my mind whenever I see that word?

V'Ger.

And if you're a nerd like I am, you won't have to click on the link. You'll already know what V'ger is.

Almost There

We're at Thing #22. Downloadable media.

Our library uses two different vendors. Overdrive Media and NetLibrary. I really like Overdrive. I think its easy to use. I've never had a problem downloading stuff from Overdrive. I borrowed one of the library's MP3 players and listened to Terry Prachett's WinterSmith during workouts. I must say it is easier to listen to book while running than it is to read a book while running. Sadly enough, I have tried. (Treadmills can get boring, especially if you're by yourself.)

I don't think NetLibrary is as user friendly. At least it isn't with the ebooks. It may just be our setup that's confusing, but when you have to access it differently from outside the library then from inside the library, its not a good start. I know they've been making changes, so I should probably try them out again. And look, they have Le Guin's Powers available. Guess I'll have to check out an MP3 player again.

Podcasts

I think I would enjoy podcast more if I actually had a MP3 player. Sort of hard to download and listen on the go without one. I explored Podcast Alley, which indexes free podcasts from all across the web. You can browse by topic or search using keywords. Although, I'm not sure how accurate their keyword search is. I was searching for some of my guilty pleasures; and, when I tried X-men, I got one called Crochet for Men. I suppose if you say them really fast, they sound alike, but still not sure how it ended up on my search results.

I've been intrigued by podcasting for a while. I think it would be fun to do a book talk/reader's advisory type of podcast for the library. But I have no idea how to start one. I don't mean the technical part. That's pretty easy to find out. I mean convincing other people to do it and getting them to commit. Any suggestions?